My friend Flo had commented to me that she thought this formation looked like a depiction of the chakra system, with the three descending satellite circles below the body symbolising the three lower chakras. The heart shaped areas up the thorax were chakras four, five and six, with the out spread wings and crescent disc being symbolic of the opening crown chakra and connection with higher states of consciousness.

I thought this a very useful interpretation and pictured two undulating streams of energy crossing at each of the seven chakra points. Interestingly there are two ways of deriving the parabolic streams of the caduceus from the geometry underpinning this formation. One thick, one thin. (Diagrams 9 and 10 respectively) Take a point any where along this infinite chain of interlocking vesica pisces and regard this point as the thickness of your intent, the relative coarseness of manifestation. "The thickness of the geometers line", in other words. In the case of the thick caduceus if the two central circles of the vesica pisces figure which you have chosen as your starting point, are used to determine the thickness of the emerging figure, then I was delighted to note that these two undulating streams will cross each other exactly seven times before the space between these two undulating currents was subsumed by their relative thickness. In the case of the thin caduceus, the thickness of the paths are determined by the way the two sets of nestled left and right vesica pisces interlock with each other, but this caduceus works in exactly the same way and it too crosses itself seven times before the gap separating the streams is subsumed, so it loops back on itself and ascends to the point of manifestation. The figure thus becomes a sort of holographic, fractal like thing, where whatever starting point is taken, the same seven fold structure emerges. Given the number seven's presence in the geometry of this formation it is interesting to note that this formation appeared exactly 77 years after the publication of an intriguing drawing by the C.W Leadbeater, the pioneering and controversial theosophist, who unified the exact same principles contained in this formation all those years ago.

A further interesting property of this interlocking vesica cone is the fact that the cone emerges at an angle of 60º, so the figure could be rotated around a further five times, to give a psychedelic mandala of duality.

In the case of the thin caduceus, the relative size of each portion of the figure can be precisely described by four nested hexagons. Quite why this works is beyond me but the diagram entitled "Nested Hexagons" clearly demonstrates this property." The thin caduceus seems to converge at singularity."

This formation appears to contain so many esoteric references, both geometric and symbolic, that I'm sure it has still further secrets to yield up. As other folk have pointed out, this formation seems to reflect the paradoxical nature of reality and the transcendent third principle that emerges from the unification of polarities. In both the 'Swallows' formation and in this 'Winged Caduceus' the connection between duality, flight and transcendence is very interesting. A creature cannot fly with a single wing. It needs two physical wings in order to produce a third unifying principle, flight. Flight depends on the dual nature of its physical components, but it in itself it is not a thing as such but a process. Perhaps, this is a useful way to regard the nature of duality and transcendence.

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